"You are disoriented. Blackness swims toward you like a school of eels who have just seen something that eels like a lot." ~ Douglas Adams

OS By Use Case

OS X:

Scripting (you’ll actually need to if you want to have the capabilities and customization of a Nix box).

Annotation (Probably what I think it’s best for of all the OS, although my ipad really gives it a run for its money).

Text Editing

Collecting (Amazing, Even though its overkill to nth degree I actually use two cliboard managers Unclutter and CopyEmPastEm).

iOS:

Actually iOS with the right apps and a good bluetooth keyboard is a near perfect text manipulation machine. Mind you I haven’t found a LaTeX editor for it that I am 100% happy with or even 80% happy with but that’s life I suppose.

Text Editing

Searching

Collecting

Getting PDFs

Annotation

Scripting (Particularly in python)

Photo Editing (I prefer to do this on my ipad, its just flat out easier).

Making TikZ geometric graphics (but not flowcharts, no)

Anything concerning social media (which I actually go out of my way not to check, I’ve put all those apps on a back screen thats hard to access. Not because I find social media particularly engaging but because I find it necessary but hugely annoying).

Linux (Preferably Debian)!

Instead of listing all the great things Linux can do (which would easily fill this page), I’ve decided to list the three things it’s not as good at as my Mac, everything else it’s the best choice for IMO.

Windows…

You can play games with it.

Windows hasn’t been an option for me in years. I hate it if there were anything I hated more than Windows OS it would be Microsoft Office. Why is everyone still using office suite software? It’s insane, and Excel/Numbers really? If you send me a .doc file to work on I’m going to use Pandoc to give me a plaintext, tex, or markdown file (time estimate less than 15 seconds), open it in TextMate, do whatever to it, convert it back to .doc (because I am nice), and send it back. There is no way in hell I’d load that bloated monstrosity on my computer. It doesn’t even have BASH!

"A good stock of examples, as large as possible, is indispensable for a thorough understanding of any concept, and when I want to learn something new, I make it my first job to build one." - Paul Halmos